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Comment by eatbitseveryday | Hacker News Reader

> What is Congress browsing?

This question implies something else: what are all the URLs referenced/accessed by Congress? The page says something different, and I believe the headline is misleading:

> This page is a public record of any time someone visits GovTrack.us from within the United States Senate, House of Representatives, or the White House, and their associated office buildings.

Of all pages one can browse on the web from within Congress machines, how relevant is GovTrack.us overall in that data? It's like saying the ISP publishes only my browsing data that happens to hit on my ISP's own website itself. Did I misunderstand something?

A better strategy would be to determine which ISP serves Congress, and pay them for the data of IPs originating from Congress.

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> A better strategy would be to determine which ISP serves Congress, and pay them for the data of IPs originating from Congress.

This isn't an either-or scenario. If you want to do that, do that. Go raise a lot of money. In the meanwhile, there's this, and it didn't cost anything.

I appreciate the work! It was not clear to me from reading the webpage whether people in Congress actively and consistently use GovTrack.us

I think this ironically proves the anti-regulators point which is that everybody has the right to track you like this and it doesn't do much to selectively target the ISPs with more regulation. The FCC regulation would not have stopped govtrack from doing this...

The shame in all this is that nobody with influence has been able to stop scaremongering long enough to make this case: "correct, consumers shouldn't have to think about which companies can do what with their data - we need to put privacy controls in place for everybody."

But that wouldn't be a very popular message with most Silicon Valley lobbyists.

This is a ridiculously misleading headline.

> A better strategy would be to determine which ISP serves Congress, and pay them for the data of IPs originating from Congress.

Except that would be illegal (and no ISP is going to sell raw data, even if they could)

What law is there to deter de-anonymizing data from an ISP? With a combination of ISP data, tracking cookies, etc. from multiple data providers, individually identifiable profiles should be possible.

yeah they need to extract data from cookies or go home.

Only as misleading as people parroting that "ISPs can now sell your personal browsing history" after the passage of SJ Res. 34

I personally think this a fantastic and appropriate way to demonstrate the privacy issue to legislators, within the bounds of what is actually possible with the information that's out there

Perhaps Google or another major website that is actually heavily used by most people, could publish search results or whatever else it collects, specifically from Congress IPs. That would have a much greater effect than data from GovTrack.us

I don't really get how non ISPs demonstrating their ability to track and expose people's browsing history is a good argument for regulating ISPs. Also google was against the regulation probably because one of their side businesses is an ISP.

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